http://www.arviesmith.com/collection-pages/chitlin_circuit/dem_golden_slippers.htm
My father had come up to Portland for the first time this week, and he came to finally see my in my new apartment and get a tour of my new "adopted" city. As per usual we talked for hours at home and out on our journey about history, religion, art and culture. Even though our conversations seem to drift, digress, pause and evolve, they somehow always seem to come back to the core concepts that sparked our interests in the beginning. This weekend one of those concepts that kept emerging and tumbling back and forth was identity. We looked at my piece in the "Nothing On The Wall" show and spoke about how individuals from birth are unique, and yet who they are and will be is not singularly contained within themselves, but also projected and outlined within their environment. The environment helps to define and outline individuals just as much as that individual themselves. To be an activist, our environment must first challenge us to have something to act upon, therefore helping us define ourselves in relation to that external event. To be an intellectual, we have to find engagement with the world and share intellect, but only more so comparatively than someone else in the world. To know what night is, we have to be aware of day, and vice versa. There have to be at least two elements for comparison, before we can make distinction and definition between one or the other.
I feel that the push and pull of influences and forces that create definition and outline individuals is extremely powerful when it comes to race and culture. It is common to understand someone of a different culture by first examining our own. Then we compare, weigh, and judge, based upon our own unique understandings. In anthropology, this is called an ethnocentric viewpoint. [explain ethnocentricity] It is an analytical and very human point of view. We learn new languages by connecting the meanings of the strange sounds to the meanings of the familiar sounds we've grasped. In school we learn new concepts by piggy-backing on the foundation of old, familiar concepts (as seen strongest in math in which simple formulas like addition and subtractions are often conceptual building blocks for the more complex formulas of quadratic equations and (TBC).
